I thought the software had been updated to correct this issue, but upon closer inspection it hasn’t. The fix that’s needed isn’t a big one. The back end works fine, but the Magpie module that pushes out the front end RSS feed needs to be updated to a later version. Bump the forum on SourceForge if you’d like to see it fixed. It also wouldn’t be too hard for a PHP person to create a similar piece of software from scratch if this one turns out to have been orphaned.

If any of you PHP developer types are interested, drop me a note: joshua dot a dot braun at gmail dot com. Maybe we could join forces and put something together.

Reblog is a great tool for doing this. On the backend it serves as a Google Reader-style feed reader, inhaling any feeds that students give to it. On the front end, it kicks out a combined RSS feed that includes only the items from the inhaled feeds that students decide everyone should see. Students can also post one-off URLs as items in the combined feed, or even write their own posts as feed items. It works really well as a nice social tool for reading feeds as a group and outputting the best-of. It’s also non-commercial and open-source, so you can host it yourself and not have to worry about University policies against forcing kids to sign up for third-party services for course credit.

Scuttle is an open-source, locally installable version of Del.icio.us that is also a nice way of doing stuff like this.

Lastly, if your University doesn’t mind commercial solutions, there are plenty of polished, professional social bookmarking and social news services where students can also curate a list of links, including Del.icio.us (of course), Newsvine, etc. Google Reader itself is also becoming more social.